Friday, January 18, 2008

Time Warner: Download Too Much and You Might Pay $30 a Movie

Let’s say you buy a new Apple TV because you want to rent
high-definition movies. And say you are about to move to Beaumont, Tex.
If so, you might wind up paying Time Warner Cable as much as $30 when
you download a movie using its high-speed Internet service.


Time Warner said on Wednesday that it was going to start testing a
new rate plan in Beaumont that would limit the amount of bandwidth each
customer can use each month before additional fees kick in. Alexander
Dudley, a Time Warner spokesman, said that the exact terms had not been
set, but that packages would probably offer between 5 gigabytes and 40
gigabytes a month. The top plan would cost roughly the same as the
company’s highest-speed service, which typically runs between $50
and $60 a month.


Mr. Dudley said the company was still working on what to charge
people who exceed their limits, but he pointed to Bell Canada, which
has imposed bandwidth limits on its customers. According to its Web
site, Bell Canada charges as much as 7.50 Canadian dollars ($7.42) for
each gigabyte when customers exceed the 30-gigabyte limit on a plan
that costs 29.95 Canadian dollars a month. Since the average
high-definition movie is 4 gigabytes to 5 gigabytes, that would mean a
charge of at least $30 a download for customers on a plan like that who
were over their limit.



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